Why AI detectors can’t solve the problem they were built for

About a year and a half ago, I began deliberately deleting em dashes from my writing. It was for exactly the reason you’re thinking—because AI chatbots tend to overuse them; their presence was becoming a tell. Even if the words were 100% human-generated, I thought anyone reading might raise an eyebrow if they saw them and wonder, Is this AI? You can’t blame the world for its suspicion. Synthetically generated articles, social posts, and emails are everywhere. An analysis by Graphite found that AI-generated articles now account for roughly half of everything published online, running dead even with the human-written share. And even though the presence of AI text doesn’t necessarily mean the content is “slop,” most people use it as a proxy for quality, or, more precisely, whether or not it’s worth their time. Recently, AI detectors have received a lot of attention because they’re ostensibly supposed to fix, or at least mitigate, the problem. They haven’t, for three reasons: First, they can be unreliable, sometimes producing false positives. Second, the presence of tells—even ones that are human-originated—is still a problem, and it plays out in the reader’s mind, where no detection …